Quote:
Originally Posted by wasabi622
Jesus Christ doc.. where do you come up with these things?? hahahaa!! If only..  |
Since at least the 1936 Charlie Chaplain film
Modern Times, the general public has looked to a future where, for good or ill, video-mediated telepresence would achieve what the half-millennium-old optical telescope never could. One day, the dreamers said, we would have enough channel capacity in our public telecom network to make videoconferencing more than just the one-time high-tech demo which Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover took part in way back in 1927.
When the semiconductor laser and low-loss optical fiber were developed in the late 20th century, it was no longer fanciful to say the day of enough cheap trunk bandwidth would surely come. The mass deployment of cable TV made the simplicity of a last-mile wired connection obvious. And then exploding microprocessor power offered the frosting of all but free real-time data compression as well.
Just as we were waiting for the videoconferencing explosion to hit, a funny thing happened. The cost of storing digital information plummeted precipitously, seemingly without end. It now made sense for a lot (albeit not all) of the stuff we had once thought would be the subject of live, interactive video telecom to instead be stored for replay on demand - either over wires (e.g. YouTube) or even from highly compact local storage media (e.g. video iPods). The 1993
You Will TV ad by AT&T, in which a kid looks at the live video feed of a remote robot flipping physical book pages never came to pass, because it became dirt cheap to snap and store digital page images in advance instead, in the manner of
Google Books.
<center><big>AT&T TV ads about the future from 1993-1994</big><br><object width="445" height="364"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MnQ8EkwXJ0&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&border =1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MnQ8EkwXJ0&hl=en_US&fs=1?rel=0&border =1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="445" height="364"></embed></object></center>
Videoconferencing and some other aspects of telepresence continue to expand, but they are doing so in a surprisingly paced manner, in marked contrast to the very explosive video-on-demand surprise. But serious people, like Ray Kurzweil, below, still look to a time, within a decade, when telepresence (much facilitated by virtual reality) becomes a routine part of everyone's life.<center><object id='cspan-video-player' classid='clsid:d27cdb6eae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000' codebase='http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0' align='middle' height='500' width='410'><param name='allowScriptAccess' value='true'/><param name='movie' value='http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=194500-1&start=6692&end=7283'/><param name='quality' value='high'/><param name='bgcolor' value='#ffffff'/><param name='allowFullScreen' value='true'/><param name='flashvars' value='system=http://www.c-spanvideo.org/common/services/flashXml.php?programid=171739&style=full&start=669 2&end=7283'/>
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In this context, it is hardly extraordinary to speculate on the type of entertainment modality explored in this thread, without regard to the specific artist. This is especially true as the economy-wrecking potential of global energy price spikes provides a powerful new spur to having communications substitute for the transportation of persons whenever effective.